Is LGBTQ Visibility Backfiring? | Trans Rights & Culture Wars

We fought for LGBTQ visibility. So why does it feel more dangerous now?

In this episode of Queer 101, I sit down with historian Hugh Ryan to talk about the current state of LGBTQ rights in the United States — from anti-trans legislation and drag bans to the political strategy behind “protect the children” rhetoric.

We unpack how attacks on trans healthcare, queer education, and media representation are shaping a new phase of the culture wars. We discuss how funding tied to women’s rights, Black communities, feminism, and transgender advocacy is being targeted — and what that means for the future of LGBTQ organizing.

Why are universities quietly altering queer archival language?
 Why are film and TV companies feeling pressure around LGBTQ representation?
 And what happens when Pride becomes dependent on corporate sponsorship?

This conversation goes beyond outrage. We explore practical strategies for LGBTQ resilience — including mutual aid, community organizing, reducing social media outrage cycles, and rebuilding in-person queer infrastructure.

If you care about queer visibility, trans rights, LGBTQ politics, and the future of Pride, this episode is for you.

Follow us at:

• @peppermint247
• @hughoryan
• @pridehousemedia

Write to us at:

• questions@queer101podcast.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey y'all, welcome to Queer 101.

SPEAKER_03 0:04

I'm Pepper Matt and Do the Historian, and we're here to bring you all things queer history that you didn't learn in school.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

This is a podcast where we dive deep into queer culture, books, and a queer experience, past, present, and future. From the history that shaped us to the culture that keeps us driving, we have got it all covered.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Grab a seat and let's turn a light on queer history because these stories demand to be heard and must be celebrated.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Welcome to Queer 101. Class is now in action. Hey y'all, welcome back to Queer 101, the podcast where we talk about any and everything under the sun, including queer art, queer culture, and queer literature. I'm Peppermint.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

And I'm Hugh Ryan. Okay, Hugh the Historian. Oh, Peppermint, happy spring.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Honey, happy spring, honey. You know, we have been discussing and discussing a lot about politics lately, but that is really what is at the forefront of my mind. So I hope that that is okay with you again this time around. Because it's chaos, darling.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

Oh, I mean, how can we be thinking about anything else right now? I mean, it's like, as we were discussing last week, it's systematic. The stripping of our rights piece by piece. It feels like a distraction technique, but it's not, you know, whether it's it's Trump's war, whether it's Epstein, whether it's threatening to invade or actually invading sovereign countries or re taking Greenland, it's just putting a stranglehold on everything, you know. No one I know has been thinking about anything but politics for the last week. It's just inescapable.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

You're a hundred percent right. And you know, I think that it's it's you you mentioned distraction. I would say uh a word that I've been trying to use is diversion because it is obviously real. The impact on the all of these all these things that they're doing, the flooding of the zone, it's real. The impact is real. People are actually affected when they go through things like immigration and trans people losing rights. But that at the same time, you know, it's also it ha it serves multiple purposes. So while it diverts our attention, it also allows them more time to um subdue us while they while they just rob us blind and take all of our money. You know, I think that's essentially what they're doing. So in this moment, we we are here to essentially teach everybody via an historical perspective. Um, but I, you know, I thought maybe we just tackling one topic at a time might overwhelm people and and um add to the confusion. Uh so I know that we're gonna get heated, as we always do. It always ends up at the end of the episode. Um it's it's like so just get ready for it. It's just too much. It's too much.

SPEAKER_03 2:59

No, you're right. I think that it's important that we we think about these things globally and we think about them uh all at once, you know, that we don't let ourselves get diverted, uh, but also take each part seriously. And the thing that I have been thinking about, and and this goes back to when before we were discussing politics, when we were discussing heated rivalry and discussing the Olympics and discussing queer visibility, do you know how we appear out in the world and how much some of what is happening right now to me feels like it's it's uh it's a a slap in the face, you know, that we've spent the last like 30 years fighting for visibility, and sometimes it feels like that visibility now is bringing us more danger than ever before. Uh and I'm wondering like how do we how do we hold those two things at the same time? You know, like so much of the the sort of quote unquote queer movement of the last 30 years was about making sure there was representation on television and representation in books and that people were out. You know, that was the big chant that I remember from the 90s of come out, come out wherever you are. Uh and now it feels like that's changing. Uh that there are people who don't want to be out, uh, who for whom being out is dangerous. I mean, not that being out was ever not dangerous, right? But it feels like there's some slippage or change, and that roles are disappearing from television, and the representation we fought for is also being threatened. And yeah, it feels like all of this stuff that is happening around us, the stuff that focuses on queer people, some of it is really that we made space for ourselves, we fought for room on the TV, on the book lists, on the pop charts, in our families, in our churches, in our houses. And now, for a long time, the response was, okay, you know, like, right, we're people are gonna make some room, there's gonna be some kind of assimilation, at least some gesture towards saying, like, yes, queer people deserve a seat at the table. And now I just don't know if if visibility is hitting the same way. So I'm wondering, what are you thinking about it these days?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Uh, I agree. I mean, certainly right now, it's quite obvious that uh the visibility isn't isn't hitting the same way. If you remember, uh, you know, uh the Elon Musk and Doge initiative that was uh it was even before Doge, though, because before Elon Musk came on board, or at least before Doge was announced, the Trump administration very early on had released a list of words that they literally wanted removed from all federal documentation, websites, just all those types of things. And I think that was part of the the the marching orders of Doge was basically to go through all of the federal grants and and basically federal uh sources of m money that were going to be sent out, whether it's through aid or grants or different types of things, loans, uh, and remove any of them that had uh, you know, women, black feminist, transgender, yeah. Feminist, transgender, uh any of that language um, you know, that they were calling woke language. And then we saw a couple of weeks ago now, I guess, the uh the release of, I think, I think in part, thanks in huge part to Matty um Burn Matt Bernstein, uh, I believe, who went through all 12 hours of the uh deposition of the two, I believe just two uh Doge, former Doge and Doge employees, these young men who were, I think 20, not even fully graduate, not even graduated from college, I believe, um, who were tasked with canceling these uh loans and and grants that were going to go out to you know nonprofits and and organizations, community organizations and and initiatives and programs that lost that money uh because they had these words associated with them. And it was these two guys that were uh in charge of them. I can't remember their names, but they're terrible.

SPEAKER_03 6:52

You probably do not forget their names, do not forget their faces, people.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Yeah, let's not. Um, and there's a whole bunch of them. Certainly there's that one that they were calling Big Balls, um, that was, I think, overseeing the group. Uh anyway, uh clear c literally being out and having inclusion and invisibility uh at that level in terms of I mean in in the arts, in in medical uh, you know, uh organizations, whatever, any any group organization, initiative, whatever program that's going to be uh applying for and receiving or accepting federal funds is in jeopardy. And so we we know that. We also know that the uh that the FCC Brendan Carr alongside with Trump uh basically is either tweeted out or officially sent out or put in an executive order, basically a warning to any film and TV company platform channel that has, you know, um queer or trans representation that they need to remove that now. I know that there like a month ago there was a uh move against Netflix because they had some kind of kid show that had some queer kids in there, somebody two dads or something like that. And they were trying to get that uh removed. That Elon Musk was like heavily behind that initiative.

SPEAKER_03 8:18

And didn't they have Pixar say that they had removed queer content from their newest film because they were afraid that it was going to like send families to therapy? You know, and they're not even being directed by the government to do that. This is just them, you know, bending the knee preemptorily. I had a meeting two years ago with these folks uh calling themselves they're the Invisible Histories Project, they're incredible. They collect queer histories from the South, and they said to me, this is before the the last election, and they said to the group of us in the room that they were here to tell us two things. One was that Trump was absolutely going to win the election. They were like, Don't don't fool yourselves, it's going to happen. And the other one was that they had for years been working with universities around the South, and they said that the goal was for the collections that they had found that needed to be housed, needed to be preserved, the goal was to get them into universities where they would be safe. And that now they had already been seeing throughout the South universities that were getting rid of queer collections in their archives, and ones where they were stripping out all the metadata, all those words, gay, trans, feminist, so that they wouldn't get destroyed. But the end result was that once those words were stripped out of it, no one could ever find it again. They were basically hiding them within these archives. And they said to us, now is the moment. Like we need to return to creating our own queer collections, queer archives, and that they had switched strategies. They were no longer going to try to work to get these materials out of private hands and into universities, into uh small local libraries, that instead we really needed to be working on private queer spaces because otherwise everything was going to be threatened that had once been kind of this gold standard. And it's that same thing you were talking about. It's like that visibility that makes these collections findable is now the thing that makes them endangered.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Yeah, I think that is a a disadvantage. Uh and I but I do also think that, you know, I mean, maybe that's just a matter of us going back to the way that things were, because we know that there were always queer people. Uh, and and we know that queer people were always in entertainment, film, television in every single industry, uh, even though they weren't able to be out for risk of being fired and things like that. And I also think that like we weren't necessarily, when I say we, I mean I don't know, listen, the queer rights movement has done so much and advanced so much, and we've we've we've made so much headway, and it is uh terrifying and and and uh infuriating for me to see so so much of that progress get lost, a hundred percent. And I fear for what it means for the future of trying to regain some of that progress once we uh make it through whatever this is that we're getting through, the fascism. But I do think that you know if I look back at it from my recollection, and I could be wrong, queer representation was always there, but it was a frequently negative and a stereotype based on the misgivings of the people that were putting it together. They always wanted to have the queer in the movie and the film and the thing, but they were just poorly written, they were in inaccurate, they were not authentic to the community, it didn't come from our point of view, but it was always there. And I think the biggest fight was not so much having a gay person on a TV show, it was making sure that that represent that that re queer representation was fair and accurate and not not problematic and not offensive and all those things. And I think that that was more the bigger fight of organizations like Glad. Now, GLAD has definitely sort of um you know workshopped with many people in many industries, most notably entertainment, to get more representation. Um but I think their first initiative was better representation. And uh and so I do think that even if they remove all of the queer and all of this from the the scripts and of that, you're still gonna have studios, TV shows, projects, things like that, still having some swishy game. Now, will it be accurate representation? Probably not. But it I don't think that they'll be able to I don't think that they want, they meaning I think it would be very difficult to remove the notion of a queer person from the minds of everyone as at the same time. And I and I think that there's too many people that don't want to do that because if you do do that, then you don't have a group that you can make an example of, you know?

SPEAKER_03 12:53

Also, I think that we see all these times where it's like, oh yeah, they say they want to ban drag, but also if frat boys want to put on like shit. They're doing drag.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_03 13:02

Yeah. Yeah. It's like they want to be able to do it, they want to have the control over it, but they don't want something coming from our point of view, coming from our critique, our actual reality, our lived lives. And I do think you're right that, you know, we've always been there. You know, 30 years ago, it was hard to find that kind of real representation in any mainstream sources. And so while I am very concerned about what is happening right now, and it is dangerous and it is going to hurt so many people, the change that we have seen in queer stories, queer visibility, queer power uh in just 30 years is so major that I think that there are a lot of us who lived through a time where, like, yeah, those representations were not out there. They were not, and and are used to that sort of like fighting to make better representations, fighting to make better TV, better books. Uh, and I think that that knowledge, that experience, like having that within our lived lifetimes, is going to be really essential for the next few years as these battles pop up everywhere. You know, it's like how do we navigate and how do we spread the word about queer life if we can't do it on CVS because Barry Weiss isn't going to let actual queer stories, even though she's a lesbian, right? On air.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

And I think that that sort of falls in line with mutual aid on a larger scale. Like mutual aid is obviously basically just helping each other, but that really is allows people to become people uh um connections, neighbors, whatever, whoever's helping each other and and to what degree, uh, it allows them to become more self-sufficient in this modern era where it's like very capitalist and everything's corporatized and digitized and you know, all these types of things. And so, like thinking, oh my god, where would I get a cucumber from if I couldn't, if there were no grocery stores? You know, that kind of thing. And so I think doing the same thing. Where would we see a drag show if they shut down all of the bars? We'll figure it out. Like we're in the basement on on such and such street, you know, like we'll make it work. Um, and I, you know, so so that's kind of just my response to what you were gonna say. But I did want to move to the um conversation about like drag and versus trans and representation, because I think that we were just to the point where we were able to we were definitely we definitely arrived at a point where where trans representation was bec was distinct from drag, you know, um, because there was definitely a moment in time when those things were conflated. Uh yeah, we're there for better or for worse. Too long too. And yeah, exactly. Um and now we obviously people understand the difference, and clearly, you know, the people who are anti-trans know the difference, and they're seem to they were all up in arms about the drag. And I knew it years ago, like in two t in 2022, I remember saying, if we give that much fuel to this drag conversation about drag queens reading books, like that was really the main thing that they were focused on. And we are going to open the door to to debating if we engage in a debate about drag queens, we are going to be uh inadvertently gay engaging in a debate and opening the door. We're taking the door off of the wall and just making an opening for trans to to just to debate trans rights. And that's exactly what happened. They they smoot they move so seamlessly into attacking trans people that it didn't even When's the last time you remember them talking about drag queens?

SPEAKER_03 16:31

Bands on drag, maybe, but I think you're right. And I think that that moment that you're you're talking about is so important historically because it shows that that same technique that they use over and over again, right? It's about drag queens and children. Protect the children. I mean, this is that constant refrain of like whether it's protecting them from being trans or protecting them from predatory trans people, or 30 years ago it was the gay teachers who were going to recruit them or molest them, or you know, a hundred years ago we see the same stereotypes about immigrant communities. It's like over and over again, people fall for this pretend concern about children, right? Not that we shouldn't be concerned about children. Of course we should be concerned about children, but like we do all kinds of things all the time that we know harm children. Football in schools harms children's brains.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

We send them to Christians, we send them into Catholic school, we send them into church, we send them to, you know, we send them to take a picture with the president. All of the things that we're gonna do is that's putting them in one day. Yes. No one really does that.

SPEAKER_03 17:37

That's the thing they use all the time is oh the children, oh, we have to watch out for the children. Right now we're seeing it again where it's like the initial edge was oh, we're worried about the medicalization of trans children, and now they're just all out coming for all trans health care everywhere of every age, you know? It's like that same using of children. It's gross, it's just gross to pretend to care about kids and then use them in that way.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Yeah, but we know now that like at least we know now that morally that they're that they there really isn't much of a leg to stand on the next time that they use some other group to talk about how def defending the children, because as long as the Epstein files are out there and people are defending this president and this then and defending the notion of hiding the Epstein files indefinitely because the Epstein files are not out, they're hidden, they're redacted, they're not being straightforward. As long as that's happening, then we then then I then I give everybody permission to say, fuck the kids. Fuck the kids. You're fucking the kids. We don't give a fuck about the kids. So who cares about fucking kids? Whatever's gonna happen, if a kid's gonna turn gay, let him turn gay. He's probably gonna be safer than being around your fucking ass. So who cares about fucking children? Parents will have their children feed your kids, clothe your kids, get what you need, but the government is not helping you. They're making you poorer and making it harder to take care of kids. They're not giving you the health care that you need to make sure that your kids are healthy. There's nothing in this situation, in this governmental situation, the federal situation, uh, and then in that perspective that really does care for the kids, even if they were really genuinely thought that drag queens were harming the kids. Who cares? Okay, the kids are not at a drag show. But they're not healthy, they don't have a tooth in their head, they can't get any food, and they have no and they're out on the street because they don't have no place to live. So what are they doing about the kids? Nothing. So I don't want to hear shit about kids. The next time somebody comes up and says, but the kids, but the cow say, fuck you and fuck the kids. It's about making sure that everybody has equal rights. That's it.

SPEAKER_03 19:35

Yeah. They want to control bodies. I mean, that's it. They turned we hate abortion and women having control over their bodies into we are the party of pro-life. Pro-life is one of those terms that fucking pisses me off so goddamn much. I'm like, you're pro-life, you're pro-war, you're pro the death penalty, you're pro-people starving to death, people going without medications. The one thing you were in favor of is men having control over women's bodies. And now I think we're seeing this again with it's like, oh, we're worried about the kids. You're not worried about the kids. You're worried about controlling the bodies of queer people, of trans people, and making it impossible for them to exist. Fuck the Republicans who pretend to care. They're just hypocritical assholes. And the people in their party, these are just pisses me off. No, that's true. It is absolutely true. I do get more frustrated with them because they present themselves as the party of fit kids, you know, whereas I don't think Democrats ever do that. But it's that hypocrisy that drives me nuts. But you're right.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Somehow the Democrats are not the notion and the name of being, you know, pro-LGBT, and typically liberal policies are the ones that push things forward. But, you know, the modern establishment Democrats, especially the elected officials right now, are very are doing very little to protect any of these groups that that that the Republicans seem to be targeting. I mean, if the Republicans are so obviously targeting women's rights and trans rights and queer rights and with all these different things, it's so obviously doing it so loudly and it should be very easy to see where the target is and to protect the fucking target. But for some reason, the real the Republicans are like, we're gonna on Friday, we're gonna get take all the women's rights away. It's Monday, it's Tuesday, it's Wednesday, it's Thursday, it's Friday, and the Democrats didn't do shit, and the Republicans advertised that every day on Friday at noon, we're gonna be there. And exactly. And so I'm re-election.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

In that moment, they're gonna vote really hard and then they'll do something, and that is the one thing that will actually be done, and it won't mean anything. It won't mean any changes. Nothing will come around. Yeah. It is so nice to know who actually has your back and who doesn't. Like pride, I was thinking about this as an example. It sucks that all this money is getting pulled at from pride, you know, and and I've talked to a lot of local prides where they were dependent on corporate money and did not realize that until that was taken away, how fragile they were and precarious that was. But also, like I wanted them out, fuck them, they never cared. And it's so much nicer to have a pride yet, yes, might be small and might be DIY and might be. a little ragged in certain ways, but is actually queer and is political and is for and of the community and not this kind of I I do you ever go to the um the r what is it called the the resist pride I forget what they called it the alternative pride that started a few years ago in New York. It's just so much more fun. The energy of it is so much better.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

The March they call it the the March.

SPEAKER_03 22:24

So that yeah I think it's just a much better much better sort of situation and I don't know much more enjoyable even though sadly a lot less money for gigs to pay performers and to pay like I used to get paid to do events around pride all the time and that has not happened the last few years. So like everyone else I missed the money but the event is so much better.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Yeah you know I think it it'll be fine about finding a a happy medium in those things and allowing corporations and and corporate money to um to be taken and accepted no strings attached without having the presence of corporations and um and if and if corporations do want to be involved they it can't be a commercial it can't be paying for placement to just be a commercial it has to be something that is you know like we'll accept your your money but you are agreeing to donate food without your corporate name on it to the homeless LGBT shelter for for the next 10 years.

SPEAKER_03 23:26

You're responsible for and you're simultaneously not giving money to the anti-gay politicians like you can't show up and be like oh but we don't give benefits to queer employees right like you can't come to Pride and actually pay no I hope that that's how w we people will you know um operate in the future I mean I don't I'm I don't specifically mean pride or the pride organizers for New York Pride or other prides.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

I mean just in general I hope that the community will have that sort of outlook when they see and I remember people being so like disgusted by seeing corporate thing when when corporate when then when the New York Pride parade became like bank after bank after bank after bank float and you were like what is this it just felt like so weird. And and the but I think the response was not as from the community might not have been as nuanced as it needed to be I don't think it should just be like oh corporations and that's it because I think people got like an icky feeling from seeing the corporate signs. Knowing that we were being everything was being sort of rainbow washed. But I do think that now this time around we can be really strategic with how we engage with them if we decide to engage with them at all. You know and you know I this year will be a um the the sort of testing the proving grounds for that because I think this year there is no corporate no corporate floats or anything in the parade.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

I think in some ways it kind of goes back to you know those first like I think about in the early 90s it was like absolute vodka putting out some queer ads and then Subaru putting out a lesbian ad. And those companies I while I don't love corporate culture or capitalism or much of what they were doing in those moments making that decision was actually a political act right those were companies that frustrating as they were in many other ways it's it meant something for them to do that. And I think we're moving into a moment now where we can really evaluate like oh companies like Target like you can see how shallow their commitment was how little they actually cared. As soon as they thought it was worth it to them to abandon you know the black community the queer community they were out and now they're regretting it. And now we're gonna see like what communities what companies step up in meaningful ways, change their policies, protest the I think that's it those days are done because corporations don't have one voice now.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Corporations have a Spanish language channel, a French language channel and a German language channel. And they'll have a different message on the German language channel but they'll be like we hate those Frenchies and on the French channel they'll be like we hate those Germans and that and and people are like you know so it's about these siloed groups of people that they're able to gin up and be like everybody shop at Target or whatever you know shit thing it is they're they're promoting. And they have a different poster for different ones. That's what's that's in effect what happened with like Bud Light for instance. Bud Light has been a pro uh supporter a a contributor a corporate sponsor I should say of Pride for a long time. And so it really but it was just the fact that people were able to see on one channel that they would have never ever ever ever ever ever seen having um you know a trans person on the thing they would have never seen that whereas it's kind of tantamount maybe to like you know Subaru putting a lesbian um full page ad in advocate magazine before like in the 90s before Advocate mag magazine had a website. And the Straits were never going to see that. They were never going to see that. They are not gone I mean some of them were gone but most of them were not going to go pick up that magazine. You know they were going to miss it. And so I think these are now the silos have fallen apart.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

Like I think that's they have fallen apart. Everyone hears about yeah I mean think about Dylan Mulvaney and what happened to her you know it's like in 20 years ago straight people would never have heard about her getting that can of Budwet you know but today back down.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:17

Yeah and so I think we're seeing like as the as it becomes obvious that oh we can't just like speak out of one side of our mouth here and one side of our mouth here.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

The algorithm doesn't protect the silos anymore. The algorithm intentionally I don't know if you're on threads but you know it like comes with Instagram on threads they're legit not showing you any content from your friends. They're like here's someone who you will hate. Here's their post you will yeah and and so it's that it's legit that's what they're doing. So obviously you're right like the silos can't work in that situation if they're constantly trying to you know get us angry uprising.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

And the algorithm all it wants to do is make money. It just wants to keep us there and anger is the easiest way to activate us to keep us there to keep us clicking and pissed off and it's one of those things where it's like I have found myself seriously stepping back from a lot of different kinds of social media which is hard because you know our careers sadly you you have to be on it to a certain degree but it's like I don't want I I found myself constantly being activated into outrage by things that I could not affect or do anything about stupid comments by stupid people and I would spend the rest of the day like fucking spun out trying to like hunt down something that I felt like I could send to this anonymous asshole on Twitter to make them change their mind. They probably weren't even a person I could do that would change their mind. Yeah but that activation like was ruining me you know like I would lose whole days to it and now I find you know and I love social media I think you know the the ability of it to spread information to let folks know about political movements or queer life in places they wouldn't otherwise to get activists together uh the way we saw Twitter being used during the Arab Spring like there are some great parts to it too but I I more and more these days am seeing the ways in which like I don't like it and I don't want to be on it. And it it causes me to have all of these like emotional responses to things that are awful but are also like not in my world or anything I can do anything about and instead I get fixated on those instead of the things that are closer to me that I might actually be doing something about. And so I I just have had to really diminish my social media time.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

I'm g I'm happy for you. Uh listen I I I I go back and forth between that because I do think in 10 years me being with me being the not online person is there a world where we're gonna be flying around in spaceships and human beings won't actually leave their their living uh abodes their living quarters and they'll we're just gonna be plugged into a computer and 100% of our interactions will come from through a screen I think there that is a possibility in the future you know what I mean where being in in plugged into something is going to be necessary for for social function. But it's not necessarily it isn't now I mean socially it is necessary to have a to have an understanding of what the rest of society is doing. But I but clearly it is possible to live and breathe and be born and eat and have experience joy without ever having to even have well you don't even need a phone, you know in in some regards. It means uh things will probably be a lot slower and a lot less instant for for for whoever does that but it is not necessary. So when the electricity goes out or when these corporations like completely turn into the devil then we know that we have another option which means just take us back to the the digital dark ages I guess. And the on the other hand you know that brings up we had a question on our brief about like does uh does constant contour con does constant discourse online uh disg distort reality does constant online discourse distort reality and uh you know I don't really know if it does yeah it is a tongue I don't know if it does or not but I do think that it does uh it it really I hope the question is presented and I hope people be able to sort of examine for themselves what does action mean in real life what is effective action and can they be inspired into action from their conversations and posts that they see online.

SPEAKER_03 31:34

And hopefully the answer is yes and sometimes the action is just retweet this and share it um and then obviously sometimes it means doing more like at the bare minimum calling your damn useless senator to at least let them know that you know that we know um but you know I don't know besides that if it if it if it I think it's true though that it activates you know and I I hope that people then move do more I right because I worry that there was a time period I think it's less now but there was five years ago ten years ago a period where people were like I'm an online activist you know like my whole activism is Twitter and and I think that's less now. That's just my sense that the people who are like doing that who really care are also actually doing things that are mutual aid whether it's online or offline. I'm not saying it has to be but like they're not just social media activists and that the people who are just social media activists or the bots because they've taken up that job are uh a little more we can tell what they are you know they're not as like we're that we ignore them or or just avoid them. So I don't know if the constant discourse is distorting reality but I hope that we've moved away from the discourse being the entirety of the the action that there's more people who are like if I'm gonna be annoyed about this online I'm gonna take it into my real world and make changes somehow either in my community or at my job or just in how I process the world because I know that for me otherwise if I don't do that I just end up like holding all the emotions from whatever it was I saw online and and not having anything to do with them and like taking them out of my partners and my cats.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

I think that one thing that we should do in the future is I mean I know what I did because I'm preparing for the big one uh before we we close out here uh is people should look up and research the sort of like online sort offline mesh network of in terms of communication there's devices that are connected I mean it's like the um it's basically the next evolution of the ham radio which I never had any context for what a ham radio was in my life but it's apparently like a similar um technology um which allows people to ha use these sort of like relay networks electronically to send messages individual message packets to um you know from one one signal to the next signal to the next signal until it gets to its destination and it's not um it's not centralized so it's not online it doesn't use the internet it doesn't use um traditional it uses some other airwaves uh and something that's like in can be encrypted and and private and um unique as it goes through and this is a way that we can communicate I bought a bunch of those radios honey um and so I'm just waiting to use them. I've got a wave radio I don't know if it'll ever actually be useful but I was like no just in case holding on to it it is a they're always using that in in our favorite in my fate like in like um movies or TV shows about like the zombie apocalypse somebody's using a short wave radio I don't really know how to use it but I have it that's good to know you're right I gotta check out these mesh networks.

SPEAKER_03 34:53

I don't know what a mesh network is that's what I'm gonna be Googling when we get off of here. So uh you should also if you're at home going what the fuck is a mesh network Google along with me let's find out together and see if we need to buy one or set one up. I'm not sure which one it is I think you know in terms of my my preparations for this like coming apocalypse I I don't know what to do or what are the right things to do. But this year has really been about for me trying to spend as much time in person with people that I care about as I can whether that is like having a dinner with people just to check in, you know, or like going to organizing meetings uh meetings that sometimes I would attend on Zoom previously if I can be there in person, I try to go in person now. I it just feels to me like spending time with people and really hashing things out in person where we can be nuanced and we can be angry when we're angry and sad when we're sad and not have it captured and then sent around the world at the wrong moment. That means something to me and it's not a um a technological preparation it's not like a prepper's preparation I'm gonna starve to death in the apocalypse but like I'm hoping someone around me will actually remember who I am and care about me because we spent time together and that feels to me like the best way I'm gonna get ready for this.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Well I'm gonna get ready to go because I gotta catch the train. But I'm so glad that everybody listened to this thank you so much. Please listen to the uh share this like this do all the things and we will talk to you on the next yes yes next Tuesday join us talk to you soon thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_02 36:20

This podcast is part of Pride House Media hosted by us Peppermint and Cube produced and edited by Josh Rosenspights with original music composed by Mel Balaband.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

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SPEAKER_02 36:40

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SPEAKER_00 36:49

Thank you for listening and remember our history is your history stay proud stay curious and we'll see you next time on Queer 101